Staying with the trivial (abstracts)

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Attempts at revealing something hidden in plain sight

Harald Østgaard Lund, Research librarian (NLN) & artist

The ambition for Usynlig til stede (Invisible Present) has always been high: to tell a broad history of how photography has become both increasingly omnipresent and invisible. This story was to be told not only in words, but equally in pictures. From the outset, the picture editor was integral, and the book was conceived as a balance of text and image.

The challenge was how to make different kinds of photographic invisibility visible. The attempts had to be as diverse as photography’s manifestations over the last eighty years: negatives, transparents, screens, telephoto, data files, and prints in albums, walls, catalogues, postcards, posters, papers, magazines, and books. The means have been repetition and variation, layout and cropping, with emphasis on materiality. Captions and credits are varied, selective, often unorthodox. Shadows and reflections were deliberately utilised to emphasise surfaces and three-dimensionality, resisting conventional reproduction. The book includes meta-pictures — pictures about pictures — produced intentionally or accidentally, by artists or circumstance.

The winding path of photogravure

Jan Pettersson Professor emeritus (KHiO), researcher & artist

Jan Pettersson has for the past 30 years worked with and researched old photomechanical processes where his focus has been photogravure on copper with artistic research into multi-color copperplate photogravure and research into historical print archives/institutions & other relevant archives.

In a lecture called “Photomechanical Prints: History, Identification and Care” by Alisha Chipman, Senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress, USA said the following concerning photography. “The abilities of photography as an implement, supplement or replacement to printmaking”.

This can be interpreted as follows: The medium photogravure is not limited in use solely in the photographic concept. It is a media that can mimic anything and out from the mnemonic aspect of remembrance this creates vast new possibilities.

In our digital world were the access to imagery on the internet and the claims around “something being but it is not although it looks like” is a predominating factor “things that look alike suddenly become the real thing”.

With all the new developments within the digital aspect, the medium has now re-adapted and re-developed itself again where possibilities seem to be endless in the way to combine medias. The massive impact of the digital in reference to the final result opts for confusion concerning the photographic aspect verses the photomechanical in between the in betweens.

What If? Goethe’s homunculus as trivium

Siv Frøydis Berg

In the second act of Goethe’s Faust II, the “little man” Homunculus is artificially created in a medieval laboratory. The experiment, informed by contemporary science, is only partly successful: Homunculus is half-created, endowed with cultural and historical omnipotence, but lacking a physical body — encapsulated in a glass phial.

What happens when we consider Homunculus as a trivium? Literature connects poetic imagination with science and emerging technologies. Goethe’s peculiar text becomes a thought experiment driven by “what if?”, opening enduring questions: What is a human being? What is nature? What is the spirit of life?

Homunculus may be seen as Faust’s double — a divergent path in the narrative. In his ambition to materialise, he leads one of the most spectacular time-travels in Western literature, becoming a travelling trivium, carrying contemporary tensions and unresolved questions into Goethe’s Classical Walpurgis Night: a place beyond time and space, into an abyss of pre-mythological cultural history, to the origins of the world.

Time lines – Trace and transmission

Geir Harald Samuelsen

This site-sensitive, transdisciplinary art project was developed with curator and UNESCO coordinator Ruxandra Balaci. Through gestures uniting gaze, hand, and space, Samuelsen works with painting, objects, and sound to create resonance between the tower’s architecture, the body’s presence, and historical materiality.

The project was realised in the UNESCO-protected Butchers’ Tower in Sighisoara, Romania — a building layered with European history. The installation responded directly to acoustics, light, and temperature, forming the core of the upcoming publication Time lines – Trace and transmission.

Stemming from international collaboration between art, archaeology, and cultural preservation, supported by the MET Foundation, Cultfort programme, and Norwegian EEA funds, the project shows how gestures, memories, and materials can be activated and transferred between eras. The KHIO presentation reflects on art’s role as resonant, transformative intervention in the sensory encounter between body, place, and heritage.

From data to disclosure: learning as digital technè

Jana Sverdljuk, National Library of Norway

What happens when learning in the humanities classroom becomes mediated by digital technology? Does technology reduce objects to data for manipulation, or can it foster deeper engagement and reveal creative potential within subjectivity.

By analysing how media-studies students appropriated digital tools at the NLN’s Digital Humanities Lab (DH-Lab), this presentation explores how digital practices become part of an epistemic culture. As in artistic production, new ways of understanding reality are opened.

Theoretically, the discussion draws on techne as developed in Ancient Greek philosophy and reinterpreted by Heidegger, tracing an artistic-technological process in which creators engage with materials to reveal inherent qualities. Within this paradigm, the DH-Lab appears not simply as a technical resource but as a cognitive environment where students learn to reason through digital infrastructures rather than merely with them. Students emerge as reflexive practitioners, recognising both the potential and limits of computational methods.

The wool

Professor Kirsti Bræin (KHiO)

Wool has a strong place in Norwegian culture. Yet in today’s fibre economy, dominated by synthetics, wool risks being undervalued. How can we recreate understanding of its worth?

For sheep farmers, shearing often represents expense rather than value. Against this backdrop, Connecting Wool is an international collaborative research project between design schools in Tokyo and Oslo, motivated by investigating values in wool. “Connected” becomes a clue: through design thinking and artistic practice, across cultures, we explore connections between landscape, humanity, and nature.

Dialogues at KHIO led to encounters with activist Bente Øien Hauge and artist Jens Hauge on their farm in Lærdal — a place where agriculture, cultural history, and art coexist. Wool becomes an entrance to understanding place, history, and culture: the obvious we have, and what we risk losing; the long lines and the moment.

The interface as trivium: Where knowledge multiplies in the click

—Professor Lars Johnsen (NLN)

A student searches for minne (memory) in a 19th-century corpus, clicks on a collocation, reads context, then clicks back to see new patterns. This recursive movement between part and whole, context and pattern, is digital hermeneutics in action.

Here, the interface becomes a trivium — a meeting place of inquiry, algorithmic logic, and archival materiality. A single click multiplies possibilities. Interfaces reveal objects that never existed before: the n-gram viewer renders timelines of word frequencies across centuries, visualisations unseen until the researcher asks, becoming the first witness to hidden layers.

By reframing interfaces as trivia — both meeting place and seemingly trivial — we uncover the iterative, dialogic heart of digital hermeneutics. Archives cease to be passive repositories; they awaken as active collaborators in knowledge creation.

The learning theatre

—Professor Theodor Barth (KHIO)

Against the idea that the future is a “problem to be solved,” the learning theatre explores time as networked — multiplied rather than merely added. This paradigm resists weaponising the self to engineer the future, instead alloying paths of writing with its trivial involvements. The learning theatre is a ‘memory machine’ rigged to transpose the trivial into a framework of relevance.

Over ten years, the learning theatre has bundled timelines in KHIO’s design department, hatching repertoires of readiness among MA students. Writing, contingencies, and oblique partnerships feed debate on whether writing is best intercepted as a linguistic medium, or is better understood in its remediations — as scores that play out in art as much as in science.

This intervention is a trivial rejoinder to Helene Uri’s I shake hands before penetrating. It works in concert with the seminar, resonating with Harald Østgaard Lund’s photographic histories, Kirsti Bræin’s Connecting Wool, Siv Berg’s Faustian research, Jana Sverdljuk’s DH-Lab reframe, Lars Johnsen’s onboarding design for hermeneutics in the digital age. Does hermeneutics make sense? If so, is there room for improvements?